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Saturday, 25 April 2020

The Plot Against America: Adapting a Novel for Television

"It's about:
What if the magnetic forces at work in our country were just given a little
push in one direction. What if a certain kind of intolerance was just given a slight nod from powers on high?"

– Zoe Kazan, actor on the HBO series, The Plot Against America

“History
is a nightmare from which none of us can wake.”

– James Joyce, Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man

This
review contains spoilers

Michelle K. Short of HBO photographed the screenshots

In Anti
Social, a riveting account of the alt-right online trollers who elevate the
persuasive narrative above any semblance of accuracy, evidence or fairness,
Andrew Marantz interjects the wisdom of the philosopher, Richard Rorty, who
contends that history is not preordained but is contingent and depends on the
way people bend its arc. I thought about Rorty and Marantz’s far-right profiles
as I reread The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth and watched the six-part gripping HBO mostly-faithful television
adaptation by creator David Simon and his collaborator Ed Burns, widely known
for their productions among others of The
Wire and Treme. I found the
gradual slide into fascism in America more convincing in The Plot than I did when I first read it in 2004 – likely because
of the current American political climate – and that the Simon’s and Burns’s rendition
offers innovations that enhance the relevance of the novel by creatively blurring
the distinction between the early 1940s setting and our time.

Philip Roth

Roth at one point in the novel explicitly asserts
that the unspooling of history is not predetermined. It occurs when the
narrator, (who toggles between the young seven-year old Philip and the older
Roth retrospectively recalling this time sixty years later) recognizes the
difference between the history taught in school “harmless and inevitable” and
history as it is lived through, “the relentless unforeseen.” Given that
premise, the 1940 re-election of Franklin Roosevelt was never assured, and the
Republican nomination and election of a political neophyte, the America First
isolationist and anti-Semitic admirer of Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, was a
plausible possibility.

The worst of the Depression was over and the
electorate might have preferred a relatively young robust bona fide aviation
hero, perhaps the greatest hero of his generation, over an aging, frail spent
President who had already served two terms while no previous President had sought
the office for a third time. Isolationist sentiment exercised a strong appeal
for Americans disillusioned by the propagation of fabricated atrocity stories
that prompted so many Americans to support the Great War, by the belief that
the subsequent sacrifice of so many soldiers had not been worth the price and
that European wars were"none of our business"Moreover, anti-Semitic sentiment increased during the 1930s and, according to
one poll, 53 percent believed that Jews were different and should be restricted.

Ann and Charles Lindbergh

Lindbergh never offered himself as a candidate but
he was approached by right-wing Republicans and he refused. But what if he had
accepted the invitation? He would certainly have easily defeated the
establishment candidate, Wendell Willkie, an internationalist, who was easily
defeated in the general election by Roosevelt. It does not take much for Roth
to rejigger history and to imagine Lindbergh winning the 1940 Presidential
election on an anti-war, tacitly anti-Semitic platform, and quickly
establishing an “understanding” with Hitler in Iceland.

Unlike Sinclair Lewis’s 1935, It Can’t Happen Here,which
at times veers toward the author transplanting conditions from Nazi Germany
into America, one of the great strengths of The Plot is that Roth’s depiction of the gradual devolution of the
country into fascism and the fracture of an American Jewish family feels rooted
in the American experience. For instance, when the Roth family (Levin in the
television series) travels from their Jewish enclave in Newark N.J. to
Washington D.C. for a holiday visit to see the historic sites, they experience
hostile reactions and discrimination, expertly dramatized in the television
series where much of the dialogue is lifted from the novel. The father, Herman,
an insurance salesman, who is outspoken in his opposition to the Lindbergh
presidency, becomes the target of an anti-Semitic slur from random strangers on
two separate occasions when he is reproached as a “loud-mouthed Jew.” The
family is denied entrance at a hotel, one that it had previously booked and
paid for.

It is debatable whether the family would have faced
this kind of garden-variety prejudice in the real world of Roosevelt’s America,
or that the election of Lindbergh would have emboldened ordinary Americans to
openly express sentiments that might have been more guarded in the real world
of that time. Regardless, it is this permission to utter ‘politically incorrect’
attitudes in Lindbergh’s America that renders parallels with Trump’s America,
not that the current incumbent resembles Lindbergh except that each incites
fear and loathing against a minority (or minorities – Muslims, Latinos, Asians) – cohort. After the first chapter which details the campaign and election of
Lindbergh, he becomes a shadowy distant figure who largely vanishes from the
text (and, apart from one brief anodyne radio speech, the television series);
no one would say that about the celebrity demagogue after the 2016 election.

The anti-Semitism in The Plot becomes more official and overt with the creation of the
Office of American Absorption (O.A.A.). Roth’s portrayal of the Lindbergh creation
and its insidious policies is persuasive. Under its auspices, the accommodationist,
Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who becomes the leading mouthpiece and ‘useful idiot’ for
the administration, institutes the smarmily named “Just Folks” program that
encourages Jewish teenagers to spend a summer in the American heartland among
Christian families. Its purpose may seem benign but as it turns out it is more
an American version of the Hitler Youth movement which alienates the
participants from their families.

Rabbi Bengelsdorf (John Tururro)

The Roth (Levin) family’s oldest son, Sandy, eagerly
travels to a tobacco farm in Kentucky despite the objections of both of his
parents. If Sandy is a representative sample, the program may be considered a
stellar success. After he returns from what he believes was a wonderful
experience, Sandy becomes the poster boy for assimilationist Jews like Bengelsdorf (John Tururro) who has been co-opted to promote Lindbergh’s goal, the erosion of the Jewish
communal identity. Shielded at that time from the malevolent presence of the Ku
Klux Klan stationed in Kentucky, he is brimming with enthusiasm for Lindbergh.
He dismisses his parents as “ghetto Jews” for their opposition to the program and
their contempt and hatred for the President. He despises their endorsement of Walter
Winchell, the gossip columnist and radio journalist, who becomes the leading public
opposition voice to Lindbergh.

If Sandy perceives
Winchell to be a loud, offensive rabble-rouser, his parents are desperate for a
spokesman to act on their behalf. They have received notification from the
sinister “Homestead 42” program requiring their involuntary relocation to the
“real America” in Kentucky, supposedly to help them better assimilate. (Given
that Lindbergh in real life lamented the large number of Jews in New York and
added in his diary, “A
few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos.
And we are getting too many" further lends plausibility to Roth’s
depiction of a repressive Lindbergh America.)

If the prospect of
forced displacement were not enough to unsettle Herman and Bess, a FBI agent is
hovering about harassing family members with questions about what others are
saying that could be construed as disloyal to the President. The agent is
especially interested in Philip and Sandy’s older cousin, Alvin (Antony Boyle).
After joining the Canadian army, Alvin loses a leg in the war, and on returning
home finds that he has trouble holding on to a job since he is regarded as anti-American
and politically suspect, likely a Communist, because he fought against the
Nazis.

Roth balances the larger historical material with
the family drama and its relationship with their community. In the first
chapter, readers will learn much about the history; Roth even quotes from
Lindbergh’s diaries to provide further evidence of the aviator’s anti-Semitism
and support for the Third Reich. By contrast, Simon and Burns wisely focus on
the micro level while utilizing the Newsreel Theater for Herman (Morgan
Spector) and his sons to watch and the Winchell radio broadcasts – that become
increasingly ubiquitous – to inform the family of the larger picture that is
happening in Europe and America.

Simon also shrewdly departs from Roth by abandoning
Philip’s limited narrative perspective and substituting a multiple viewpoint. Simon
presents Philip (Azhy Robertson) as a wide-eyed boy who observes much, is
deeply affected by the emotional stresses in his home and to what happens to
his next door friend, Seldon Wishnow (Jacob Laval). The two leading female
characters, Bess, (Zoe Kazan) Herman’s wife, and her sister Evelyn (Winona
Ryder) are perhaps the chief beneficiaries of this change.

For most of the
novel, Bess’s role is minimized and Evelyn is little more than a cipher but
Simon develops them, especially Bess, to be fully rounded characters. Apart from a couple of wonderfully touching scenes
between Bess and Herman, she is a quiet grounded presence exuding fear and
anxiety, whether it is from her husband’s public angry outbursts or the
attitudes of the outside Gentile communities. As a result, she feels a strong maternal
need to protect her children, even urging her husband to immigrate to Canada.
(A number of the family’s Jewish friends flee to Canada feeling that they would
be welcomed there. In the real world, the Canadian government was intensely
anti-Semitic. I wonder whether Roth was aware of that reality or that his
portrayal of a generous Canada is part of his alternative history.)

Bess (Zoe Kazan)

Bess generally avoids political discussion because
she, more than any other character, seems the most aware of the nightmare ahead
for Jews. But when Evelyn, engaged to Bengelsdorf (John Tururro) and an
administrator of the Just Folks program, obtains permission to invite Sandy
(Caleb Malis), without the approval his parents, to a presidential dinner honouring
the German Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, Bess is furious. Her anger is less
about politics than her sister’s personal intrusion into her family. It is a forceful
scene, absent from the novel in which Bess finds her voice, which she will
continue to use to protect her family. She privately attempts to convince Bengelsdorf
to reverse the decision to reallocate the family to Kentucky. She challenges
her husband about his political engagement after he attends a Winchell Presidential
rally as the police standby and offer no protection for the candidate’s
supporters when thugs physically assault them. She further provides a calm
reassuring voice over the telephone to Philip’s friend, Seldon, who is
frightened and alone in a small community in Kentucky. As Herman retreats more
into the background, his faith in America’s better nature fading, recognizing
that he has become “the other,” she becomes the backbone of her family. Kazan
is riveting throughout, especially in a scene when she confronts her sister with
pungently personal and political salvos late in the final episode.

Herman at Winchell rally

In the novel, Evelyn is a minor character who does
not even appear until the second half when Roth presents her one-dimensionally
and unsympathetically, an opportunist only interested in exercising power through
her attachment to Bengelsdorf. Simon and Ryder turn her into a more nuanced
character: lonely, desperate to be loved, flirtatious but genuinely attracted
to the charismatic Rabbi. She shares his deluded belief that Lindbergh is a
good man who will protect the Jews and that she is providing in the “Just
Folks” program a positive service that will benefit, among others, her nephew,
Sandy. Ryder’s range broadens as she becomes increasingly confused, frightened,
even terrified as violence spikes against Jews and threatens her well being. Yet
she also seems oblivious to how her complicity with an administration, that has
encouraged a war crime, puts her sister’s family at risk.

Evelyn (Winona Ryder) and Sandy

In the final wrenching episode, Simon introduces both
dramatic and politically-charged departures from the novel, one that may say
more about the present moment than Roth’s alternative history. Like the novel,
the sixth episode, chronicles the fallout of the Winchell assassination. While
in the novel, the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, offers a broadcasted eloquent
eulogy to Winchell, Simon uses the occasion to show three members of the Levin
family attending the funeral as an expression of their own solidarity and for
their slain spokesman.

Herman, Philip and Bess at Winchell funeral

As violence erupts in
their community, Bess and Philip cower in their apartment as gunshots are heard
while Herman and Sandy drive to Kentucky to pick up Seldon, the most tragic
figure in both the novel and the series. In the novel, Herman summarizes to
Bess what happened when they return while Simon adds frisson by dramatizing the
trip in a sequence brimming with tension that reveals an American expression of
the German Kristallnacht: the burning of cities and Jewish businesses and a
close-up of the demonic and frightening presence of the KKK and their handiwork.
But the trip also reveals the gradual awakening of Sandy to the malevolent
reality posed by Lindbergh and his sensitivity at a crucial moment to Seldon.
It finally ends with a moment of humour that enables a relaxation of the tension
arising from the trip as well as a mutual understanding between father and son.
The Kentucky trip is one of the most memorable tableaux in the series.

Herman and Sandy witness the destruction

By the end, Roth has
tweaked history back to Roosevelt being re-elected for a third term, Pearl
Harbor is postponed a year, and the Americans fight and help win the war.
Because the series was made in 2020, Simon offers his own more ambiguous and I
think more satisfying ending with unmistakable echoes of the present. He
accepts Roth’s deus ex machina in the form of the President’s wife, Anne Morrow
Lindbergh’s radio broadcast after her husband’s disappearance condemning the
anti-Semitic riots and calling for a special Presidential election.

David Simon

Simon’s inspired choice
to include on the soundtrack Frank Sinatra’s, “That’s America for Me,” while
the camera pans the citizens as they line up to vote, is a moving montage redolent
of a reassuring return to a democratic ritual. But this upbeat mood is
counterbalanced with Sinatra’s crooning turning ironical by a menacing tableau:
voter suppression, election rigging, the theft and burning of ballots, and an
ending that presents the election results as a cliffhanger. Simon is perhaps
hinting that the final results will not be known until November 2020. The
vignette consists of only a couple of minutes but it remains firmly etched in
my mind.

In 2004 Roth wrotethat
he did not intend his novel to be a "roman clef" to the present moment in
America.” By contrast, Simon is under no such stricture. He has stated that he
would not have dramatized the novel had Clinton been elected in 2016 and that the fascist interlude in the 1940s
could serve as a precursor to Trump’s America. The fascists have been displaced
by the alt right who are rabid supporters of an increasingly authoritarian
President who has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to fan the flames of
hatred. As Herman says in the final episode, “There’s a lot of hate out there
and he knows how to tap into it.” He is of course referring to Lindbergh but we
know that Simon has someone else in mind.

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That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).